Maintained by Robin Tecon, microbiologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich. This blog is about bacteria (and other microbes) and the scientists who study them.

There is
little chance that you missed this viral video, dating back from just before
the turn of the millennium: two teams, dressed either in white or in black,
play basketball, and you are supposed to count how many passes the white team
manages to do. If you never saw that, watch it here before reading. OK, that
was the one and only spoiler alert!

In the
middle of the video, a student wearing a gorilla suit walks through the
players, thumps her chest, and leaves. I didn’t see the gorilla, just as half
of the people who watch the video, because I was too focused on counting the
white team passes. With this video, Chabris and Simons showed us that we
wrongly take certain things for granted, such as our ability to notice
everything that enters our field of view. They write in their introduction (p.
ix):

“We all
believe that we are capable of seeing what’s in front of us, of accurately
remembering important events from our past, of understanding the limits of our
knowledge, of properly determining cause and effect. But these intuitive
beliefs are often mistaken ones that mask critically important limitations on
our cognitive abilities.”